Eugene Grygo, Chief Content Editor, FTF News
Open source software and the open collaboration practices that it engenders are quietly gaining ground among software vendors, securities firms and maybe across Wall Street.
One of the biggest proponents of OSS movement, the Symphony Software Foundation, based in Palo Alto, Calif., has been consistently pulling market participants into its camp.
Known for its support of the Symphony messaging platform, Symphony’s community has grown to 200,000 licensed users across 170 companies, including 40 of the world’s top asset managers and 25 of the largest global banks.
In February, the nonprofit group added charting and data visualization provider ChartIQ, data and analytics application vendor The Beast Apps, and real-time products and services provider Tick42 as new, cutting-edge members. These members will add to the dynamic between “large financial institutions and younger fintech firms to collaborate in the open and achieve true interoperability through open source,” Gabriele Columbro, executive director of the Foundation, said in a prepared statement at the time.
In addition, about a year ago, OpenFin, a provider of HTML5 runtime technology, joined the foundation for a collaboration that will enable OpenFin and other foundation member organizations to “drive fintech standardization, contribute to the Symphony platform, and further drive the adoption of open source technology within financial services,” officials say.
“Through the foundation’s Open Governance model, OpenFin will influence the overall product direction of the Symphony platform, while its participation in working groups will aim to foster container standardization and application interoperability for the financial industry,” officials add.
The foundation now reports that it has more than 50 open source projects underway, and two months shy of its second anniversary, it also has more than 100 contributors, four active working groups, and 25 member organizations that are part of the “Symphony ecosystem.”
The foundation has also added four new Silver Members — Arcontech, BankEX, Cloud9 Technologies and FinTech Studios — that bring experience in financial market data solutions, distributed ledger technology (DLT), voice trading and artificial intelligence technologies.
“When done right, open source enables a degree of innovation which is simply not possible in proprietary development or solution-time collaboration models like open APIs [application programming interfaces] or open standards,” Columbro, executive director, Symphony Software Foundation, in a statement.
“The growth of our community shows how these strategic benefits can outweigh legal, technical and frankly cultural aspects preventing effective innovation in financial services technology,” Columbro adds. “We see our Foundation as the proven-to-be-trusted environment where fintech producers and consumers can collaborate on open source, industry-grade standard solutions, sparking innovation on common and new use cases that have the potential of reshaping Wall Street.”
With Wall Street in mind, the foundation has also announced that it is hosting an inaugural Open Source Strategy Forum in New York on November 8. The one-day conference is open to executive-level decision makers and senior technologists from financial services “seeking to drive industry innovation through open source,” officials say.
In the meantime, the foundation offers an Open Developer Platform (ODP) to open source contributors, providing open API access to Symphony and a compliant open source development process, officials add.
More information about the technology is at: http://symphony.foundation
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